Greater Stitchwort, Stellaria holostea, is a very common plant of wayside verges and open woodlands. Until it flowers, however, it is easily missed. Greater Stitchwort is a relative of Common Chickweed, Stellaria media, and like Chickweed, Greater Stitchwort is an easily-collected source of edible wild greens…
Common Dog-violet, Viola riviniana, is the most common violet in the UK and provides some useful herbage for a wild salad. The leaves have a pleasant flavour with only a little bitterness and making it a wild food worth picking up as you forage, particularly in the spring. It flowers March to May and is then easy to spot but a little less so at other times. The leaves and flowers are edible…
The primrose is widespread throughout the UK and Europe. The flowers and leaves are often described as edible but there is research that suggests handling the plant might cause allergic contact dermatitis in some people…
Brooklime, Veronica beccabunga, is an edible leafy green plant of damp freshwater places. You can eat the leaves and stem. The name may be unfamiliar but the plant is relatively common. You’ll find brooklime growing in boggy ground (the sort in which you’d wished you’d worn boots, not shoes), on the damp margins of ponds, streams and rivers and sometimes…
The pignut, Conopodium majus, is one of the most palatable wild foods. The tuber can be eaten raw and is very tasty. To the uninitiated, pignuts can be hard to spot, particularly in the spring. But once you’ve been shown and know in which places to look, they are surprisingly common. Leaves appear in the spring, then…
How should you supervise a child using a bushcraft knife? Should they even have one at all? Bushcraft knives and children do mix but it is a relationship that must be managed… Emma Hampton covers kid-specific safety tips that will enable you to guide your child as a novice knife user. She also answers some frequently asked questions regarding children and knife usage.
Late winter and early spring is a lean time. As soon as shoots start to appear, however, there are some tender, young spring greens to gather. They grow quickly too – the early spring plants race to grow before the trees produce leaves and cut out much of the light to the forest floor. You must be careful though – early spring plants often have defence mechanisms by way of toxins…
Nobody heads out into the wilds expecting to be the recipient of a search and rescue operation. Most people don’t think it will ever happen to them. But you only need to Google ‘lost hiker’ or ‘missing hiker’ to get a sense of how many people for whom it becomes a reality. A famous case, recently popularised further by the film 127 Hours, is that of Aron Ralston who became trapped by his arm…
Without leaves to refer to, people often find it hard to identify deciduous trees in the winter. For those of us who have an interest in bushcraft or survival skills, we need to be able to identify resources all year round. Bark is an obvious feature to look at but in most cases, bark shows more variety and is harder to differentiate than the leaves of different species. Buds are often associated with spring, whereas they lie dormant all winter, waiting for…
Tracking is a passion of mine. One of the things I love doing, even when I’m out for a leisurely walk in the woods, is looking for tracks and sign left by animals. Even if you don’t see the animal, looking at the sign they have left behind can provide a fascinating insight…